The government now plans to buy nearly 3 million Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine doses for young children, Centre for Covid-19 Situation Administration (CCSA) spokesman Taweesilp Visanuyothin said on Friday.
Dr Taweesilp said the government is adjusting its vaccine procurement contract with Pfizer to obtain 2.9 million doses for children aged six months to four years. The contractual change would be a swap for 3.5 million doses that Pfizer had yet to deliver for people aged 12 years and over as earlier contracted. The remaining 590,000 doses would be for vaccines for children aged 5-11 years, Dr Taweesilp said.
However, he added, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has yet to approve administering the Pfizer vaccine to children aged six months to four years. If the FDA does not approve such usage, then the 3.5 million doses under contract would be for children aged 5-11 years, he said.
For parents who preferred an inactivated virus vaccine to other kinds of Covid-19 vaccine, Dr Taweesilp said, the Government Pharmaceutical Organisation had already sought FDA approval to administer the Sinovac vaccine for children under six years. A decision is expected next month.
The country still had 3.36 million Sinovac doses in stock, he said.
As of yesterday, more than 142 million Covid-19 vaccines have been given, including 57.2 million shots for the first dose, 53.6 million shots for the second dose, 26.2 million shots for the third dose and 5.2 million shots for the fourth dose, according to the Public Health Ministry. The top five vaccines are AstraZeneca (48.5 million shots), followed by Pfizer (45.1 million shots), Sinovac (26.5 million shots) and Sinopharm (14.9 million shots).
The country registered 27 more Covid-19 fatalities and 2,110 new cases admitted to hospitals yesterday. All the new cases were local.
On Thursday, 2,028 Covid-19 patients were discharged from hospital after recovering from the coronavirus while 20,048 others were receiving treatment (up from 19,993 the previous day).
Since the pandemic started in early 2020, there have been 4,630,310 Covid-19 cases, including 2,406,875 this year, with 4,578,291 complete recoveries to date. The accumulated death toll stands at 31,971 since the beginning of the pandemic.
